


there is a crack in everything

by mercuryhatter



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Anxiety, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Other, Pre-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-30 23:36:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21436552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: There was a day, during the eleven long and breakneck years between the deliverance of the Antichrist to Earth and the apocalypse he eventually averted, when Mr. Harrison called in sick.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 25
Kudos: 165





	there is a crack in everything

There was a day, during the eleven long and breakneck years between the deliverance of the Antichrist to Earth and the apocalypse he eventually averted, when Mr. Harrison called in sick. Warlock had been about nine, and perfectly awful to every adult he came into contact with. Mr. Harrison was quick to insist that it wasn’t the boy’s fault, but it wore on Mr. Cortese’s nerves so much that, once he realized that Mr. Harrison would not be there as a buffer that day, he was only a little bit ashamed to release Warlock to independent study for the rest of the day and take his leave as well. 

But if Aziraphale was honest with himself, which he did his best not to be very often, Warlock’s exhausting attitude was only part of the reason he left that day. The other part came from the very small portion of Aziraphale’s brain that existed outside of his customary five levels of denial and two of false optimism. This part of his brain was ringing all of the alarm bells it had, though of course in a polite, hushed sort of way, so as not to cause a fuss. This part of his brain was saying, Crowley disappearing without a word was no longer something that could be automatically innocuous. Crowley disappearing now could mean the end of the world on a far faster timeline than Aziraphale was currently expecting. 

He tried Crowley’s office phone from the first pay phone he found after getting off the bus in London. When that yielded nothing, he dug around in his many dimension-defying pockets for the card Crowley had given him after obtaining that new car mobile and tried that number as well. Faced with a similar silence there, Aziraphale stood in the phone booth and for twenty long minutes, tried not to panic. 

If Crowley was gone, he reasoned, whether that was gone back to Hell or off on some other apocalypse-related errand that he had neglected to tell Aziraphale about (or whether Hell had caught on to their partnership and hauled him to their lowest pit for retribution, that one small unprotected part of his brain murmured in the low tones of a very English man-shaped creature doing his best not to scream)—  _ if _ Crowley was gone, that was only good for Heaven— for Aziraphale. After all, the Hellish influence was now eliminated from Warlock Dowling’s life, and nothing prevented Aziraphale now from raising him to be a perfect angel. 

Except that, if Crowley was gone and Hell knew he was gone, there would be another agent soon enough. And who would they send? From gossip he’d picked up from Crowley, Dagon wasn’t so bad, but the last ones involved with the Antichrist caper had been Hastur and Ligur, and Aziraphale had never heard one of them mentioned without the other. And both Dukes, as well— Aziraphale squinted as he tried to convert from Heavenly ranks to Hellish ones to determine if he had a chance, one Principality against two Dukes. He could not remember the math and gave up quickly, reassuring himself that of  _ course _ he could take them, and even if he couldn’t, he could always call Heaven for backup. He ignored the uncomfortable twinge he felt in his gut at that prospect— he had never once called Heaven for backup in his Earthly career, and there was more than one reason for that that didn’t bear examination. 

Finally, he stared at his dim reflection in the phone booth door, and said to himself sternly: “Now, buck up, you. He’s likely as not just taking another nap to inconvenience you. He is a demon, after all, that’s his job. Now just think calmly and figure this out.” 

He left the phone booth and hailed a taxi, directing it to Mayfair. 

—

Crowley’s flat did not come with roof access. In fact, there was an explicit provision in the lease that instructed that no tenants were to be on the roof at any time, no exceptions. But for Crowley, there was always an exception whether the rule maker intended one or not, and today he was on the roof of his building, smoking his fortieth cigarette of the day. 

Crowley was not typically a chain smoker: smoking was cool, and also if he did some self examination he would have to admit that his current human body was somewhat addicted to the stuff, but chainsmoking stained one’s clothing and came with an unpleasant smell, and those things were not cool. So Crowley, on a typical day, was a moderate smoker, reaching maybe a pack a day when he was very stressed. Days when he was very stressed were occurring more frequently over the past nine years, but Crowley was a demon and had no expectation of getting lung disease of any kind, and so he didn’t. 

Crowley was not very stressed today. If asked to rate his stress on a one to ten scale today, he would have looked with blank, glazed eyes at the questioner and said a number that did not exist on Earth at all, let alone below the number ten. 

It was just all catching up with him, was the thing. Nothing in particular had brought it on. He had just woken up that morning and, with no preamble, proceeded directly from a state of unconsciousness to a state of crushing, apocalyptic panic. He didn’t even make his own call to the Dowling household, just planted the knowledge of Mr. Harrison’s sudden illness directly into the relevant brains and crawled back under the covers. When his duvet cocoon became too stifling, he moved to the back of his living room couch, where he perched for a while like a nervous bat, and when that wore itself out, he went up to the roof and started smoking. Aziraphale, upon arrival, needed only to follow the smell. 

Rather than climb all those stairs, Aziraphale simply stood on the sidewalk one moment and on the roof in the next. Crowley hissed what Aziraphale interpreted as a halfhearted “go away” as he felt Aziraphale materialize. Instead of acknowledging this, Aziraphale sat down next to Crowley and held out his hand expectantly. Crowley placed his cigarette there without looking and lit himself another. 

“You gave me a fright,” Aziraphale said reproachfully, but not quite as reproachfully as he might have done had Crowley not been sitting in the detritus of a convenience store’s worth of cigarettes, yellow eyes bared to the midafternoon sun, still wearing wrinkled grey silk pajamas. Aziraphale could count on one hand the number of times he had seen Crowley so disheveled without some ulterior motive, and he did not like the frequency with which those times coincided with the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. They could not afford for Crowley to fall apart now.  _ Aziraphale  _ could not afford for Crowley to fall apart now. 

Crowley had made no answer to Aziraphale’s scolding, his eyes fixed to the middle distance. Aziraphale took a slow drag on his reappropriated cigarette and considered. This consideration took place almost entirely in the small, unprotected part of his brain, and was therefore difficult to commit to words. But it was necessary, because that part of his brain held no illusions, no rationalizations, not when it came to how absolutely fucked they might be, and not when it came to nine hundred and sixty-seven years of… 

Most of Aziraphale would call those nine hundred years something like “overt partnership,” or merely by the name they had given it when it was created, “the Arrangement.” But there had been tokens exchanged, and there had been vows, and though both of them had spent all nine hundred of those years being scared in different ways, both of them— even Aziraphale, in this small part of his brain— knew what it was really called. 

So Aziraphale momentarily put aside his five layers of denial and two layers of false optimism, and he pulled Crowley into his side, wrapping his arm around Crowley and tucking his head beneath Aziraphale’s chin. Crowley gave a great shudder as Aziraphale’s warmth suddenly leached into him, and then a long sigh that seemed to turn him even more boneless than usual. Aziraphale flicked his own cigarette into nonexistence, and Crowley allowed him to remove the one still in Crowley’s hand and repeat the motion. 

“‘M sorry I gave you a fright,” Crowley said, his usual smooth alto smudged with rust. 

“Don’t think of it.” 

“Don’t you ever think of it?” Crowley said with a hint of desperation, clearly referring to a different “it.” “Doesn’t it ever become too much?” 

“No,” Aziraphale said truthfully. Crowley gave a slightly wet laugh into the soft collar of Aziraphale’s sweater. 

“Sometimes I worry about you, angel. All the things you don’t think about… if they ever catch up with you, you might be down a deeper hole than I am.” 

“I’m very quick,” Aziraphale answered, though they were in dangerous territory for him and Crowley knew it too, changing the subject. 

“Thanks for coming to check up on me.”

“I only did it to make sure you hadn’t decided you fancied a cosmic war after all,” Aziraphale said, a little tetchily, but there was little conviction behind it now. It had seemed so likely before, when he was thinking like an agent of Heaven about an agent of Hell. But with Crowley tucked under his arm it was difficult to imagine how he had ever thought it a possibility at all. Crowley was apparently in a charitable enough mood to recognize this, and didn’t pick at Aziraphale like he usually might. Aziraphale wasn’t sure that was entirely a good sign, but it did divert them from having the argument they could have had. 

Instead, Aziraphale allowed himself to forget himself long enough to touch his lips to Crowley’s hair, and Crowley allowed himself to forget everything else long enough to twine their hands together tightly. And as if Aziraphale casting his false optimism off had allowed Crowley to put some of it on, Crowley said, “it’ll work, I know. It’ll work out.” 

“It will.” 

They sat like that for a while longer, until the afternoon sun deepened to evening gold and Aziraphale’s warmth was no longer a sufficient guard for Crowley against the November chill. Sensing this, Aziraphale asked, “how does Italian sound to you?” 

Crowley made a considering noise. “I think I’m after some Chinese, actually.” Aziraphale accepted this and made to get up, but was stopped by Crowley’s grip on his sleeve. From one blink to the next Crowley was dressed, not in his usual suit but at least in respectable chinos and a soft green pullover, glasses securely in place. 

“Your place, not mine,” he said, and though he sounded more like himself now there was still enough of a tremulous tone to his voice that Aziraphale nodded and cheated for the third time that day, rearranging the universe around himself and Crowley until they were in his back room, a fire already glowing comfortably in the grate. 

  
  



End file.
